Messages - frank

Thjis problem appears to be more complex than I first stated. One one association in my model the constraint is a bottom middle label and the name is a top middle label. There I can easily turn off one and keep the other.

On another, one constraint name and the association name are both in the top middle label, so I can only turn them on and off together.

It seems that in build 581 (and perhaps previous builds) label the names o0f constraints on associations are displayed even when the diagram properties are set not to show constraints. If you have a few of those, the diagram becomes unreadable pretty quickly.

If I turn off labels, then the constraints disappear but so does the name of the association. Also not good.

How can I display the name of the association but not the names of constraints on the associations?

(If this cannot be done, I'll have to stop putting constraints on associations and document them in one of the classes instead. That's a second best kind of a solution.)

The real annoyance came when I wanted to show a component messaging itself to perform a stage in the scenario. EA created this tiny loopback line (with an arrow) that could not be resized, or even really moved. It could slide up and down the right hand side of the object in a narrow range.

I have found this problematic in class diagrams as well. When I read your message I wondered whether the problem might be addressable by setting the line style to custom and adding and positioning line points.

I tried this and found that I could add a line point, and I could position it wherever I wanted, but the line did not move with the point.

That satisfies all three of my requests. It seems that the funtionality is there, just not where I thought to look for it. Linking and unlinking a class to/from an association I would have expected to work like adding and removing associations: drag from class to association/select dotted line and press <DEL>. Changing the classifier I would have expected to see in the object properties.

Thank you for pointing me to the currect location for these functions.

Yesterday I had to make a conceptually simple change to a class diagram. It turned out to be quite a lot of work because of how EA manages association classes.

I had a class A that was an association class between B and C. I needed to make it an association between B and D instead.

The only way that I could see to do this was to delete and recreate it. Of course I then had to recreate all links to it and visit each diagram it occurred in to reset visibility of links not important top that diagram.

Worse yet, I have objects based on class A in various diagrams, and they all lost their association to the class. I then had to edit each of those diagrams, delete each of those objects, recreate them, and recreate all the appropriate links.

Is there any part of that process that would have been easier had I only known about some helpfull feature already in the product?

Here is thje wish list that I have coming out of yesterday's work:

The ability to link an existing class to an association, making it an association class.

The ability to break a link between an association class and the association, making it a regular class

The thing that has just spurred me to write this message is that I accidently deleted a table whilst trying to delete a connector. No problem I thought, just undo and then its back again. Not the case. Undo just moved one of the other tables back to where it was earlier. This is a real gripe of mine. Undo just doesn't undo what you want it to.

I'm not sure if the undo functionality is generally weak or if it is just that object deletions are not undoable - it is only the latter that has bit me. Just this morning I accidently deleted a class instead of an instance of that class and had to spend half an hour putting it back. <Sigh>

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Anyway enough of this. Sorry for the long post. Don't get me wrong I do like the product, it just needs a bit of polishing to make it a real quality piece of software.

It is rough around the edges, no question of that. So far I am finding this to be an acceptible trade-off against the broad feature set and low cost. I paid about Cdn $4K for my Rose license. I am choosing to use EA instead of Rose even though it does not have the same polish.

The clincher for me is how incredibly responsive the Sparx systems folks have been. I have found three bugs in Rose, one that was a real problem for me, and I waited months for fixes. I have found a couple bugs in EQA as well, and never had to wait a full week for a fix.

Likewise the Sparx folks have been responsive to feature suggestions. I don't bother making suggestions to most companies because I rarely get any response beyond "Thanks for the feedback." Here on the other hand I get intelligent discussion about the proposed feature, and a couple times already I have seen the feature implemented.

I just upgraded to the Corporate edition of EA hoping that it would allow me to lock packages to users. My intention was to give specific users responsibility for and ultimate control over their own subsystems in the model.

Now I can see how to lock individual classes and diagrams, but not how to lock all diagrams and classes within a package without doing them one at a time.